Mage and Shadow
by Kayasuri-n
Summary: Paths divide, and Lucrezia stands on one of them. Her broken-eyed hero is gone, but his memory remains. One-shot, Complete, rated for sensitive subjects


_I was playing the Lost Chapters, and dealt with the bordello. And, me being me, had an idea pop into my head. Written straight through, no editing, just throwing it out there._

Lucrezia is fourteen, and a child in her father's house. She learns how to be a woman from her father's wives; her mother, and three other women. She has many sisters, and many more brothers, and the chores are unending but not hard. To her is the task of learning to adjust the worlds' weaving, pressing upon the warp and weft of energy her will and her desires. She learns, too, the ways of the body, how to heal the hurts her brothers and father receive when they go out on caravan.

Lucrezia is fifteen, when her coastal village is attacked. She tries to bend the threads of energy to her mind, but chaos surrounds her, and her concentration is lost. Her father is not the first to fall, to the filthy white-faces, but he is certainly not the last. Her brothers, too, are dealt wounds that no amount of skill can save. The men-folk die, and the women run for the hills. Some are caught by pirates. Lucrezia is one of them.

They hold her down and rape her. She will never forget it.

For a time, she is numb, unthinking and unresponsive. She comes out of it, slowly. The abuses to her body- for they continue to 'visit' her- are many, and to her mind, many more. But she is a strong girl, with a strong will. Her mother told her this, and she has no reason to doubt it. Her skill with healing returns; there is a kind of peace, when the pirates leave her be in a corner of the cargo hold, and once more the threads of energy are rewoven to her desires.

She remembers another family, a man who leaves bruises on his wives, and remembers how the women moved, spoke, looked. When the pirate captain approaches, she tries to do the same.

It is easier, that time, and the times after. Men, she thinks, are easily led.

The pirates bring her to a cold land, a hard land. She is hauled off the ship as though a sack of grain, dropped on a stony shore that is gray and dead. Her clothes, what little remains of it, are too thin for the weather and she sits shivering.

She is sold to one of the white-faces. They jibber at each other, their words as harsh and clipped as the rest of them.

She is taken from the sea and the pirates, and brought through a dark marsh where the world energy is sick and stagnant. Then she is left in her new home, a large house of women. There is one, older and worn, who mouths strange words and sees Lucrezia to a warm bath and new clothes.

Lucrezia is sixteen, and is quickly becoming popular. The establishment (whore-house) belongs to her owner, Grope. She is the youngest of the women. Madame has helped her with her image, making use of her copper skin, her young body, the pale gold of her eyes and white of her hair. The hair marks her as one dangerous, if these ignorant fools could only understand.

When she can, she sneaks away and practices her energy-weaving. She comes to learn the white-faces (Albions, from the country of Albion) call it magic.

Lucrezia is seventeen, and no longer the oldest. There is a new girl, Amelia, to coddle and care for. Amelia was sold by her father, already knowing how best to please a man. Her father had been her pimp, but the guardsmen (what are they?) wished his arrest for other matters.

Lucrezia is eighteen, and dreams nightly of slitting her wrists, her throat, of throwing herself into the lake and drowning. Anything, but to endure more of this. Men paw at her nightly; she is popular, very popular, and she might entertain four or five men a night. Amelia might see more; Hedwig and Lady Sophia less. Grope will, when the whim takes him, choose a woman for a night, see what he can get from them.

Lucrezia is nineteen when _he_ comes in. She sees him enter the bordello, just one more man who thinks with what hangs between his legs instead of what sits between his ears. He is harder looking than the other men, does not immediately move to a woman, but that is the only difference.

She finds she is wrong.

He speaks with Madame, and Grope, and then meanders his way through the receiving room, where the girls wait to be picked by some 'lusty stallion'. Bah. Up close, the differences between him and those 'stallions' are clearly more than she had assumed.

She sees the heavy hand of magic upon him, in his bleach-white hair, but particularly in the faint marks that twine over the visible skin of his face and hands, the same iridescent shade as his eyes. He wears the clothes of a farmer with unease, and his hand strays every so often to a sword that is not slung across his back.

He begins to make the rounds of the room, murmuring softly to each girl. He does flinch a little from Hedwig, it makes her laugh.

He looks around at the sound, and speaks with her next. She doesn't remember what they say- she is caught by his eyes, which despite the shade have the desperate, broken look of a man pushed too far, too hard, forced to continue on when all has been lost and cannot be recovered.

She takes him up to bed, the first time they do so. Undressed, she sees he is entirely covered in the mage-marks, and scars too. His hands are strong and rough with calluses, but he touches her gently, as though she is some fragile sculpture of glass.

After, with the sweat cooling on their skin, he asks what she would do if she didn't have to work for Grope. If she were free.

Unthinking, she says she'd like to go home. He hums, and smiles, and brushes her cheek with the backs of his fingers.

He comes back, and each time he speaks first with Madame, and then Grope, and then seeks her out. The pain in his eyes is strong when she takes him to bed, but it is less when they vacate it. With him, she can forget, if only for a brief moment, that she is doing this for money, money that Grope takes and hoards away and that when this man is done with her, there will be another who will not be gentle, who will push the bounds of her sanity with his demands, who-

This man, with the broken eyes of a hero, smiles and touches her gently. She doesn't know his name, she doesn't love him, but what they have- it's enough. For him.

For her.

And then one day Grope is shouting, its dawn, she stumbles from her tiny cell of a bedroom and sees him- her broken-eyed hero- holding an old, ragged edged piece of paper and speaking in a voice she has never heard before. And then Grope is gone, and he gives Madame the piece of paper, and turns to leave.

It is the last time she sees him.

Madame changes the bordello into a shelter for former prostitutes. There is money enough to hire mercenary guards to protect them from men and monsters, to feed and clothe them, and to help the women learn new skills so they might return to the world.

Lucrezia is twenty when she realizes she is pregnant. She is late- and then she has missed- her monthly cycle, and thinking back she realizes that it must have happened a week, maybe less, of Grope's removal. She has always been careful with the tea that prevents pregnancy, but it is not always reliable.

For a moment, she feels fear, and cups her hands over her stomach that has yet to swell with the new life. She cannot sell her body when pregnant-

But she has forgotten. She no longer needs to sell her body. She will never have to do so again. Her broken-eyed hero has seen to that.

So she is pregnant, and the time passes. They have an herb-healer who can double as a midwife. Lucrezia is not the only pregnant woman.

And then she is giving birth, and she has never felt such pain before, not even in another lifetime when her father was killed and she was raped. But this pain is worth it, worth it, because a new life is given to her, cradled in her arms, wrapped in soft cloth and mewling on her chest, mewling until she guides a tiny mouth to suckle at her breast.

A boy. Bahadur, she names him. For the hero she wishes were his father, wishes she could guarantee were his father.

Lucrezia is twenty-one, and it is time to leave. One of the mercenaries is assigned to escort her and Bahadur to their destination. Lucrezia has chosen Bowerstone, near the Hero's Guild. Perhaps- but that is a hope better left for dreams.

She has been given enough money to settle into a little apartment and begin her work. She is a healer, and word quickly spreads. Even to the point that noblewomen see her, for she treats women, mostly. Ailments that a male doctor would not understand, or worse, would make the patient feel awkward about.

Bahadur grows into a fine young boy, golden skinned and white haired, with mage-touched blue eyes. She begins to teach him the ways of magic, both what she has learnt from Albion mages and her own teaching.

Her son goes to school, and she tends to the women of Bowerstone.

Lucrezia is twenty-five when she meets Theresa.

The girl (for girl she is, though she is older than Lucrezia by several years) appears- literally- in the kitchen one morning. Bahadur shrieks the alarm, and Lucrezia is ready with lightning cupped in her hands.

Their invading guest is blind, and in a horrible, wrenching way familiar. Bahadur shares the same nose, the same arch of his eyebrows, with this woman. And this woman shares that nose, those eyebrows, with a broken-eyed hero Lucrezia knew once.

Theresa tilts her head, as if to study Bahadur. "A strong child," she says, her voice breathy, unemotional. "A good legacy."

Lucrezia sends her son to school, and sits across Theresa at the table, and they talk.

"He died of his injuries fighting Twinblade. He broke the bandits, but they broke him."

"I saw his path divide. On the one side, he fought, and came home to you. This is the other path."

"There will be those who want your son. They had my mother, but she was weak, and died in prison. And I have not the right power. Bahadur does."

"The Guild can protect him."

The Guild. Lucrezia walks away, just leaves the apartment with Theresa sipping tea at the table, and finds herself down at the quay.

Theresa has told her much with words, but more with her silence. The Guild broke Theresa's brother, Lucrezia's hero, Bahadur's father. Shattered his mind and soul, until he died of the breaking. Twinblade might have dealt the physical blows, but...

Theresa wants Bahadur to enter the Guild, to be pushed and shoved and bent into the making of the Guild, bent until he breaks.

Her son is barely five, is small and cheerful and plays with tame lightning.

She remembers, from so long ago, her father and her brothers practicing with their blades. Nods to herself. Returns to her apartment.

"Bahadur will not enter the Guild," she says. Theresa nods, as though she has expected nothing else. "I will teach him myself."

And at that, Theresa stops, and for one eyeless, stares.

"Then I had best tell you what you need to know," she says, and once more begins to talk.


End file.
